Buy Books: Browse by Season: Spring 2018

Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, Through the Looking Glass, is brought to life in the stunning artwork of Maggie Taylor. Her prints incorporate photographic elements, scanned illustrations, sculptures, and artifacts pinned against timeless backgrounds. 

Emphasizing a life course approach and developmental perspective, this volume’s interdisciplinary nature marks a paradigm shift in the way children of the past are studied. It points the way forward to a better understanding of childhood as a dynamic lived experience both physically and socially.  

Madagascar from A to Z is a children’s alphabet book written in English and translated into Malagasy. This colorful picture book features the endemic fauna and flora of Madagascar, and provides for children an engaging introduction to protecting these natural wonders. The book evolved from a project undertaken in an undergraduate honors course at the University of Florida to an international partnership over the two years it took to complete. Published by the Library Press at UF, the book exemplifies a deep collaboration among the library, undergraduates, library faculty, and Malagasy colleagues.

A biodiversity hotspot, Florida is home to many ecosystems and species that depend on frequent fire to exist. In this book, Reed Noss discusses the essential role of fire in generating biodiversity and offers best practices for using fire to keep the region’s ecosystems healthy and resilient.

This exciting book brings the often-overlooked southern Maya region of Guatemala into the spotlight by closely examining the “lost city” of Chocolá. Jonathan Kaplan and Federico Paredes Umaña prove that Chocolá was a major Maya polity and reveal exactly why it was so influential.  

In this book, Ashley Lear examines the relationship between two pioneers of American literature who broke the mold for women writers of their time.

The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. 

Exploring a variety of topics including European colonialism, migration, citizenship, sex tourism, music, literature, and art, contributors demonstrate that alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history and identity have existed long before the present day. From a moving section on passport petitions that reveals the familial, friendship, and communal networks across Hispaniola in the nineteenth century to a discussion of the shared music traditions that unite the island today, this volume speaks of an island and people bound together in a myriad of ways.

Researchers who study ancient human diets tend to focus on meat eating, since the practice of butchery is very apparent in the archaeological record. In this volume, Julie Lesnik brings a different food source into view, tracing evidence that humans and their hominin ancestors also consumed insects throughout the entire course of human evolution.

In this breakthrough study, Emily Maguire examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary.